Dogs have no function. They are just social parasites. And if you believe that, try bringing in a few half-wild range cattle on your own.
Jonah Goldberg defends the human-animal bond in this op-ed piece.
I don’t find Jon Katz or Stephen Budiansky all that convincing at all.
Dogs are not social parasites, and they never have been. They originally started out as the original sanitation engineers, cleaning up refuse in those hunter-gather camps of yore. They also moonlighted as early security systems, barking like mad when enemies of either the bipedal or quadruped variety approached. They also kept man warm, snuggling in on the coldest nights. They also provided food and furs, something we don’t like to talk about, but dogs were probably an important food source in those days when other domestic beasts weren’t available.
BTW, does anyone see any violation of Morgan’s Canon in Zorn and Budiansky’s theory?
Morgan’s Canon is derived from Occham’s (or Occam’s) razor, which argues that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumption is usually the correct one. Morgan’s Canon argues that we should not attribute to animals higher thought processes when we can explain their behavior using lower level ones.
Well, which requires higher level thought processes– actually bonding very strongly to humans or pretending to bond to humans so that the animal can be a parasite?
If the former is true then dogs are smarter than most primates. In fact, they are smarter than humans, because we haven’t figured out to make other species work 40-60 hours a week in order to feed us, buy us toys, and let us live in homes with heating and air conditioning without paying any kind of rent.
I don’t know whether dogs are capable of love. We barely understand love in our own species, so how on earth are we going to describe in another? But I do know that dogs bond very strongly with people.
However, I do know that calling dogs social parasites is about as intellectually vapid as calling them all Lassies. Calling them social parasites is very nice way ignoring the real sociological impact of pet keeping on the human psyche. All people, even “primitive” hunter-gatherers, keep pets and have kept pets in the past. It’s one of those things that sets us apart from other animals. We like to keep pets. It provides for us a sociological and psychological need that is probably deeply written into our evolutionary past. It is that part that Mr. Budiansky entirely misunderstands.
Further, dogs do provide tangible economic benefits. James Serpell has argued that it would have been impossible for us to domesticate sheep and goat without the use of dogs. Those animals in their wild state simply live too far up in the mountains for us to catch them or herd them. Even today, shepherds in the far remote mountains need dogs to manage the sheep. The people of the far north needed dogs for transport until the arrival of snow mobiles. You simply couldn’t feed horses in the Arctic, but you could feed dogs on seal meat, whale meat, caribou venison, and fish.
Further, my own dogs were developed in the Victorian Era, when gentlemen believed that it was wrong to cripple game and leave it to suffer in the field. A retriever was a humane hunting instrument, which collected the wounded birds, hares, or rabbit and brought them in for a humane dispatch.
Now, if Budiansky et al would like a better critical analysis of the dog, I would suggest that they all have a look at Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. (I doubt that Jonah Goldberg would like me recommending this book to read in addition to his piece, but that’s life.)
In that book, Veblen excoriates the dog fancy. It has turned dog ownership into conspicuous consumption, also known as “Keeping up with the Joneses” syndrome. The dogs themselves have no function or utility, and because of their lack of function or utility, keeping them is a sign of one’s stature within the community. It is the inverse of breeding for utility. The owners’ stature increases as the deformity, novelty, and lack of utility increase. That’s why the bulldog and pug became so horribly distorted. The less they looked like dogs the higher their value became. And that is part of the reason why dogs are so messed up today.
To call all dogs social parasites is unbelievably stupid. Dogs add value to human society. It might be difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on them, for much they give are intangibles. But it is clear that they do give back a lot more than they take. Otherwise, I don’t think we would have raised the dog to this high status in society.
*Note that the only reason why Mr. Goldberg hasn’t totally redeemed himself in my eyes is that I’m sure he’d call me a “Liberal Fascist.” I’m not, incidentally. I believe everyone has a right to his or her opinion, even if I disagree and will fight to keep certain policies from being implemented. But on dogs, I think Goldberg and I very much agree. I also think that a lot of so-called “modernity” is hogwash, but it’s not as much hogwash as “post-modernity.”
